Trees are only carbon sinks if you wait for them to grow, turn them into charcoal, and bury the charcoal deep in the earth. Otherwise, when the tree dies and rots, it will release all the CO2 it soaked up. It is only breaking even if you just maintain a forest. Sea life that grows calcium carboinate shells that sink to the sea floor are a way to actually remove CO2 from the carbon cycle, but it takes a long while to do. If we get freen, clean unlimited energy, we could talk about pulling the CO2 apart and making O2 and synthetic coal, and burying the coal. That's probably not happening soon.

you really have two choices: 1. punish the heaviest users; 2. punish everyone.

There is a third choice, 3. expand capability.

Find the towers that sometimes saturate. Then take some of the profits Verizon creates, and increase those towers' capacity, or just outright add new towers. Adding towers would improve coverage, boost signal strength, and in general cut power requirements both for the tower and the customer's phone.

Microsoft does a good job of supporting backward compatibility because it has to do so to maintain lock-in. If things weren't very compatible from version to version, you might be tempted to try something else. That is how Microsoft rakes in their money for a product that is in many ways worse than a free product: lock-in.

joe5 writes: Many experts suggest that battery technology is really the key to the future of transportation. Its certainly the key to unlocking Tesla for even further growth. Today, a Japanese startup called Power Japan Plus came out of stealth mode and unveiled a new battery chemistry that it says could (and some hyperbole is involved presumably) reinvent they way we think of potential transportation batteries. In testing, the recycle-able cell has completed more than 3,000 charge/discharge cycles with virtually no performance degradation, meaning that it could conceivably last the lifetime of a car. They company won’t yet provide too many details due to pending patents, and won’t even say who its first customer is — but the chemistry requires 'specific and proprietary changes to the nanostructure of the carbon crystals.'